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ART: PHILIP GUSTON IN RETROSPECT

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HERE and there in the late paintings of Philip Guston there is to be found an anthology of the images, ideas and attitudes that have shaped human awareness in the second half of our century. They are not copied, imitated or recycled in any pedestrian way, but they are there for all to see. The remarkable thing is that Guston was able to mate them - however implausibly - with the sense of wonder and the inborn sweetness of character that might have been expected to pull his art in quite another direction.

To check this out, we have only to go to the Guston retrospective that has just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and can be seen there through Sept. 13. Organized by Henry T. Hopkins for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition had Philip Guston's full cooperation and opened in San Francisco just three weeks before he died (in June 1980). We may therefore assume that in this show we see him as he wanted to be seen.

As everyone knows, Guston's career falls into three distinct phases. At first and until around 1947 he was a straightforward figurative painter with overtones of symbolism. In life, as in his art, he had the kind of social concerns that came naturally to every sensitive person in the 1930's. He was born in Montreal in 1913, of parents who emigrated from Russia around the turn of the century. A high-school classmate of Jackson Pollock in Los Angeles in 1927-28, he sympathized with the Mexican mural painters who were all the rage in the early 1930's. He was himself active as a muralist during the Depression. In 1939 his mural ''Maintaining America's Skills'' won a first prize at the New York World's Fair, where it had a prominent position on the facade of the Work Projects Administration Building. (The prize was awarded on the basis of a public-opinion poll.)

But Guston's was fundamentally a private art, and in a major painting called ''If This Be Not I'' (1945), he looked at big-city life through moon-blue spectacles and dressed up its inhabitants in the paraphernalia of the fancy-dress basket. These were people making something out of nothing in a world that had little to give them. Guston in ''If This Be Not I'' was nearer to the neo-Romantics - Eugene Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew, especially -than to Social Realism.

It was after a sojourn in Europe in 1948-49 that he painted the abstract paintings that were soon to be known the world over. As to what lay behind those paintings, with their delectable color, their magical, hesitant-seeming touch and their accumulative procedures, Guston gave us a broad hint in an interview dated 1966. ''It's a strange thing,'' he said, ''to be immersed in the culture of painting and to wish to be like the first painter.''

''I should like to paint,'' he said, ''like a man who has never seen a painting.'' But at the same time he knew that that man was himself and that he had seen, whether at first- or second-hand, just about all the paintings in the world that were worth seeing. It was a contradiction that never ceased to bother him.

Nor did he rejoice in the shift to abstraction. ''I do not see,'' he wrote, ''why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol should be celebrated as freedom.'' That being so, it could have been foreseen that one day the recognizable image would make a comeback in Guston's work. But almost nobody did expect it, and when it came about in 1970, they didn't know what to make of them. These were rough, awkward, simplistic-seeming images, in which the most dismal kind of domesticity was allied to elements from nightmare.

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They didn't get any more agreeable, either. As the decade proceeded, Guston seemed more and more to be walled up in a small private world that was almost entirely unpleasant. His own head, when seen, looked as if he had not yet recovered from a colossal bender. His boots made Vincent van Gogh's look like Gucci loafers. His coat was so caked with the grime of the ages that it stood up by itself. His bed was never made. His household habits were awful. Giant roaches were about to take over, unless an ever-rising dark flood beat them to it. The contents of the room were inventoried over and over again with an effect of distress and desolation.

So where was the anthology mentioned earlier? Well, the inventory -seen in the scatter of disparate objects in ''Cellar'' (1970) - harked back to the ''Red Studio'' of Matisse. The roaches harked back to Franz Kafka's long story ''The Metamorphosis.'' The element of monodrama - one man alone on a stage, with only sad memories for company - harked back to Samuel Beckett. The sense of life running down and time running out harked back to Eugene O'Neill in his more somber days. The unshaded lamp with its dangling cord harked back to Francis Bacon. There was even something of early de Chirico in the pile-up of disparate objects that defied all rational analysis.

Despite all this, the paintings were unmistakably Guston's own. Every element in them has a majestic unhurrying presence. Those broad, firm strokes of the brush belonged to no one else. No matter how gruesome the subject matter, Guston projected it with a wild humor. Even when his head had been sundered from his neck and rolled around like a coconut, the image still spoke for the tenacity of life. What was drab in these paintings was transformed both by the eloquence of the paint and by an inspired incongruity that came straight from the first principles of Surrealism. (Guston could put an old shoe next to a brick pyramid and make us wonder whether the shoe was 500 feet high or the pyramid just a scale model.)

The important thing in all this is to decide whether Guston's nightmares have a universal echo or whether they were peculiar to himself. Was he a universal figure, in other words, or just a compelling old crank? Everyone must decide for himself, but for this observer the paint quality carries the day - and, with that, a sense of epic scale that makes these images look strong enough to push their way through the Whitney's walls and walk out into the street. This is art that just had to be made, and it shows.

Also in the galleries this week: ''An Anglo-American Miscellany'' (Davis & Langdale Gallery, 754 Madison Avenue, at 65th Street): Along with small-scale works by Paul Sandby, Robert Henri, Maurice Prendergast, Gwen John and Lucian Freud, this miscellany of recent acquisitions includes a group of paintings by Ernest Haskell, a little-known American painter. Haskell was born in 1876 and died in a car crash in 1925. The show reveals him as a stylish topographical painter with Whistlerian overtones. He was in Paris and London at the turn of the century and came back with little panels that communicate a strong sense of place and time. (Through July 31.)

A version of this review appears in print on July 3, 1981, on Page C00019 of the National edition with the headline: ART: PHILIP GUSTON IN RETROSPECT. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe